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Written in Bone
Saturday was a perfectly brilliant day to visit the National Mall. Sun shining, flowers blooming, birds singing, clear skies, just enough wind to keep kites flying up and down the green. And a relatively average crowd size, for a Saturday in spring!
I left my apartment a little after ten, but didn't get to the Smithsonian until about noon, due mostly to a half-hour's delay on the metro. Luckily I had a book with me - I have a few weeks left to finish People of the Book before we discuss it in class. The first few chapters were an excellent prelude to a museum visit, especially to an exhibit dedicated to bringing the past to life.
Let me give some brief background about the exhibit and my interest in it. Written in Bone will be at the National Museum of Natural History until 2011. It provides, first, an introduction to forensic anthropology, then uses those techniques along with historic and archaeological methods to explore the lives and deaths of some of the earliest colonists in Jamestowne, Virginia, and St. Mary's City, Maryland. East coast historical archaeology is something I've been a bit involved with, of late, and it could very well become the subject of my MA thesis. (I tend to be more of an artifact girl than a bone girl - but I'm interested in all of it, and I want to learn.) Also, I'd just been to Jamestowne in December 2008, and visited their absolutely wonderful archaeology museum, and I was curious to see how they interpreted the material from this perspective. I'd heard a lot about the Smithsonian exhibit, and had been looking forward to visiting ever since it opened.
Also, I took a Museum Practice class last semester, so I'll probably get at least a little into the details of how the exhibit was designed and presented. Bear with me.
Quick note about me: I grew up in the DC metro area, and we used to head down to the Smithsonian once or twice a year, back when Uncle Beasley (not my picture, though there's a ton just like it at my mom's house) still sat on the mall, available for climbing on. The Natural History Museum is my number one most favorite museum, ever, in the entire universe.
So, of course, I had a lot of things I wanted to pay a visit to before I left for the day. But I headed straight for the forensics exhibit, because I knew I wanted to get through it before I started feeling even a twinge of museum fatigue.
Two and a half hours later, I walked out and ate the last of my Easter egg salad sandwich on a park bench, watching the birds peck and squabble for crumbs.
To get to the exhibit, you have to walk through the Hall of Bones - a hall that hasn't changed, at all, right down to the (still super-comfy) seventies-style round chairs, in the twenty-some years I've been going. I mostly rushed through the hall, only pausing to compare a turtle breastbone with one we'd looked at in class on Thursday, thinking that while the corresponding hall in New York is definitely shinier, I really prefer DC's, for all its comfy oldness.
The exhibit itself - and now we finally get to it, am I long-winded or what? - opens with an introduction to reading bones for age, sex, and ancestry. There's a well-done History Channel video explaining how bones change as we age, and an object lesson in the difficulties of differentiating between species, let alone particular individuals.
What struck me most about this first part of the exhibit, though, was the very clear differences between the Native American, Sub-Saharan African, and European skulls. It's one thing to hear Temperance Brennan say "Oh, the skull's quite robust, he was probably African American," or to read about it in books, but quite another to have them right in front of you - staring you in the face, as it were. (It's great to see examples of age and sex differences, too.) And it became very obvious to me that my default image of what a human skull looks like is European. We usually think of racism as something based on external (or even cultural) traits, but here was evidence of institutionalized, bone-deep racism in every aspect of science education. Is it too much to ask of textbooks and documentaries, that they maybe alternate their diagrams every once in a while, so that students can get exposure to the full range of human variation? Apparently it is.
And then I was on the watch for skulls, through the rest of the exhibit, general examples on display or diagrammed on posters. They were all European. And I was disappointed in the Smithsonian.
I had cause to be disappointed again, similarly, later in the exhibit, but we'll get there in a few paragraphs.
Next is a mock-up of a modern-day forensic anthropology lab, with the bones of a murder victim laid out under glass, and displays around the walls describing the effects of injury and disease on the skeleton. There's a shelf containing the remains of a skull fractured by a pipe bomb.
With a piece of a denture among them.
Wow.
Overall, the exhibit was set up very well. This room had bright white light and a tile floor; the rest was carpeted with soft yellow. Very nice job enforcing the laboratory theme. There was the occasional problem with flow, I would find myself starting at one end of display when I was meant to start at the other. I wasn't the only one doing that, either. That issue was particularly notable in the lab display area; if you follow it as intended, you hit a dead end, but if you go through it backwards you're fine.
Anyway, after the lab display, you walk through darkened hallway lined with some rather bizarre holograms that take you back in time to the 1600s, and then watch a video introduction to the excavations at Jamestowne and St. Mary's City. And then you get to the exhibit proper!
There are probably six or seven "Forensic Files" throughout the exhibit, forming the connecting thread of stories that ties together the discussions of historic medicine, life in colonial America, archaeology, pathology, forensics, and historiography. I won't go into great detail about each room; it was wonderful, and for the most part very well thought-out, and I encourage you all to visit (or at least visit the website).
I had a couple of very minor issues with some of the displays: if you're going to mount artifacts vertically on a wall, they should really be in stratigraphic order; there should be seating in front of the videos; some parts could have been organized better, and some of the science could have been better explained (I'm thinking of a particularly obtuse diagram of a lead detector).
I've always been fascinated by facial reconstructions (how *do* they figure out nose shape?), and the ones on display here were wonderful. There's a young man with terrible tooth decay (I think I saw him at Jamestowne, in fact) who looks obviously in pain. And I know they make the irises concave so the mannequins are less creepy, but in this exhibit I would have welcomed the scrutiny of standard-issue glass eyes. Captain Gosnold in particular was trying very hard to meet my gaze.
And now we get to the part of the exhibit that disappointed me. At one point you turn a corner and there's a big, full-wall poster about the difficult lives of African slaves: a photo of reenactors and one paragraph. The rest of that room is about white laborers, and the featured forensic case is about an English indentured servant. The room after that - small, dark, and little more than a hallway - is where they have a few artifacts related to slavery, and the forensic file about the young African woman. Every other forensic file in the exhibit contains a full-scale mock-up of the skeleton in situ. In fact, the indentured servant in the previous room has two. She has .. a small display about the excavation, a video, and a facial reconstruction. And no explanation for the lack of a full-scale mock-up.
It bothered me. I expected better of the Smithsonian.
The rest of the exhibit is about how our bones have changed over the last few centuries, and then a hands-on laboratory, where I only stopped long enough to sex a couple of ilia and skulls. Then I went to the bathroom, which I love because the hallway by the bathrooms is crammed with displays!
And .. where was I? Oh right, eating lunch on the mall.
Birdies. They like to get close.
Looking across from my bench at the Smithsonian Castle: green grass and picnickers ignoring the fence, meant to let the grass grow back after we all killed it at the inauguration.
The path down the mall.
In front of the American History Museum.
I hadn't been to the American History Museum in ages. It has changed a LOT. It was at least twice as crowded as the NMNH, and very very bright and shiny, all through. I wandered around a bit, but didn't really go in to any of the exhibits. I've never seen the First Lady exhibit, and it looks like I won't any time soon: the line's a mile long. The main reason I ducked in was to see Stephen Colbert's portrait:
They have it BEHIND GLASS. That's AWESOME.
His portrait stands beside the first part of the line to see the pop culture exhibit. THE FIRST PART. I'm glad it's there, because I do adore Stephen, but not even for his portrait would I stand in that line. The American Flag, of course, also has a line a mile long.
I did duck into the illustration exhibit, because I remembered![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
enemy_anime mentioning it; it's very small, and totally not worth the trip just for that. The artifacts along the walls of the main halls are interesting, and had I been in the mood, the historic house or transportation exhibits probably could have absorbed me for hours, or the various science-museum-ish displays. I couldn't get in the mood, though; I only felt antsy to be back in the familiar confines of the NMNH. Eventually I figured out why: the NMAH feels like a giant propaganda warehouse.
And that's sad.
Anyway! Back to my favorite museum ever!
They currently have an exhibit on soils, something I don't know nearly as much about as I ought to if I'm going to study archaeology. It turned out to be much more geared toward kids than toward me, but the wall lined with monoliths from every state were pretty interesting, and I took a picture of the column of soil types, because I can never remember which is which:
(you can see some monoliths behind it, kind of.)
I also wandered through the small Korea exhibit, and the Western Civilization hall. THAT is another hall that could use some reorganization, and hasn't been updated since I was born! (Well, they added a small display about Oetzi, but that's it.) I'm actually quite surprised the writing hasn't all rubbed off the walls. (There *are* two facial reconstructions that have lost all the paint off their noses!)
I would have liked to visit some other exhibits, especially the Africa one, but it was getting late and I was getting tired, and I couldn't leave without stopping by my most favorite exhibit ever in my most favorite museum ever: THE DINOSAUR HALL!!! (Picture me going *raaarrrrr* and making t-rex fingers at you right now.)
Mph. I kind of want to live there.
And here's the elephant, which, according to my museums professor, everyone who works there would love to get rid of, but that will never, ever, ever happen:
Oh, look at the walls and the arches and the lighting and and and .. I love this museum. ♥.
(Overheard while photographing the elephant: "I just want it to go extinct!" ... what.)
So, that was my lovely Saturday in DC. I missed that in North Dakota, and I'll know I'll miss it in Massachusetts, too: the ability to just go to the Mall when I feel like it. Maybe some of Boston's fantastic museums will help to soothe my pain.
That got long. I hope you enjoyed reading it, and I hope you go see Written in Bone if you get the chance. Despite the problems I mentioned, it is really a wonderful depiction of forensic historical archaeology.
And here's a picture of Darcy, totes chillin. Please lolcat at will.
I left my apartment a little after ten, but didn't get to the Smithsonian until about noon, due mostly to a half-hour's delay on the metro. Luckily I had a book with me - I have a few weeks left to finish People of the Book before we discuss it in class. The first few chapters were an excellent prelude to a museum visit, especially to an exhibit dedicated to bringing the past to life.
Let me give some brief background about the exhibit and my interest in it. Written in Bone will be at the National Museum of Natural History until 2011. It provides, first, an introduction to forensic anthropology, then uses those techniques along with historic and archaeological methods to explore the lives and deaths of some of the earliest colonists in Jamestowne, Virginia, and St. Mary's City, Maryland. East coast historical archaeology is something I've been a bit involved with, of late, and it could very well become the subject of my MA thesis. (I tend to be more of an artifact girl than a bone girl - but I'm interested in all of it, and I want to learn.) Also, I'd just been to Jamestowne in December 2008, and visited their absolutely wonderful archaeology museum, and I was curious to see how they interpreted the material from this perspective. I'd heard a lot about the Smithsonian exhibit, and had been looking forward to visiting ever since it opened.
Also, I took a Museum Practice class last semester, so I'll probably get at least a little into the details of how the exhibit was designed and presented. Bear with me.
Quick note about me: I grew up in the DC metro area, and we used to head down to the Smithsonian once or twice a year, back when Uncle Beasley (not my picture, though there's a ton just like it at my mom's house) still sat on the mall, available for climbing on. The Natural History Museum is my number one most favorite museum, ever, in the entire universe.
So, of course, I had a lot of things I wanted to pay a visit to before I left for the day. But I headed straight for the forensics exhibit, because I knew I wanted to get through it before I started feeling even a twinge of museum fatigue.
Two and a half hours later, I walked out and ate the last of my Easter egg salad sandwich on a park bench, watching the birds peck and squabble for crumbs.
To get to the exhibit, you have to walk through the Hall of Bones - a hall that hasn't changed, at all, right down to the (still super-comfy) seventies-style round chairs, in the twenty-some years I've been going. I mostly rushed through the hall, only pausing to compare a turtle breastbone with one we'd looked at in class on Thursday, thinking that while the corresponding hall in New York is definitely shinier, I really prefer DC's, for all its comfy oldness.
The exhibit itself - and now we finally get to it, am I long-winded or what? - opens with an introduction to reading bones for age, sex, and ancestry. There's a well-done History Channel video explaining how bones change as we age, and an object lesson in the difficulties of differentiating between species, let alone particular individuals.
What struck me most about this first part of the exhibit, though, was the very clear differences between the Native American, Sub-Saharan African, and European skulls. It's one thing to hear Temperance Brennan say "Oh, the skull's quite robust, he was probably African American," or to read about it in books, but quite another to have them right in front of you - staring you in the face, as it were. (It's great to see examples of age and sex differences, too.) And it became very obvious to me that my default image of what a human skull looks like is European. We usually think of racism as something based on external (or even cultural) traits, but here was evidence of institutionalized, bone-deep racism in every aspect of science education. Is it too much to ask of textbooks and documentaries, that they maybe alternate their diagrams every once in a while, so that students can get exposure to the full range of human variation? Apparently it is.
And then I was on the watch for skulls, through the rest of the exhibit, general examples on display or diagrammed on posters. They were all European. And I was disappointed in the Smithsonian.
I had cause to be disappointed again, similarly, later in the exhibit, but we'll get there in a few paragraphs.
Next is a mock-up of a modern-day forensic anthropology lab, with the bones of a murder victim laid out under glass, and displays around the walls describing the effects of injury and disease on the skeleton. There's a shelf containing the remains of a skull fractured by a pipe bomb.
With a piece of a denture among them.
Wow.
Overall, the exhibit was set up very well. This room had bright white light and a tile floor; the rest was carpeted with soft yellow. Very nice job enforcing the laboratory theme. There was the occasional problem with flow, I would find myself starting at one end of display when I was meant to start at the other. I wasn't the only one doing that, either. That issue was particularly notable in the lab display area; if you follow it as intended, you hit a dead end, but if you go through it backwards you're fine.
Anyway, after the lab display, you walk through darkened hallway lined with some rather bizarre holograms that take you back in time to the 1600s, and then watch a video introduction to the excavations at Jamestowne and St. Mary's City. And then you get to the exhibit proper!
There are probably six or seven "Forensic Files" throughout the exhibit, forming the connecting thread of stories that ties together the discussions of historic medicine, life in colonial America, archaeology, pathology, forensics, and historiography. I won't go into great detail about each room; it was wonderful, and for the most part very well thought-out, and I encourage you all to visit (or at least visit the website).
I had a couple of very minor issues with some of the displays: if you're going to mount artifacts vertically on a wall, they should really be in stratigraphic order; there should be seating in front of the videos; some parts could have been organized better, and some of the science could have been better explained (I'm thinking of a particularly obtuse diagram of a lead detector).
I've always been fascinated by facial reconstructions (how *do* they figure out nose shape?), and the ones on display here were wonderful. There's a young man with terrible tooth decay (I think I saw him at Jamestowne, in fact) who looks obviously in pain. And I know they make the irises concave so the mannequins are less creepy, but in this exhibit I would have welcomed the scrutiny of standard-issue glass eyes. Captain Gosnold in particular was trying very hard to meet my gaze.
And now we get to the part of the exhibit that disappointed me. At one point you turn a corner and there's a big, full-wall poster about the difficult lives of African slaves: a photo of reenactors and one paragraph. The rest of that room is about white laborers, and the featured forensic case is about an English indentured servant. The room after that - small, dark, and little more than a hallway - is where they have a few artifacts related to slavery, and the forensic file about the young African woman. Every other forensic file in the exhibit contains a full-scale mock-up of the skeleton in situ. In fact, the indentured servant in the previous room has two. She has .. a small display about the excavation, a video, and a facial reconstruction. And no explanation for the lack of a full-scale mock-up.
It bothered me. I expected better of the Smithsonian.
The rest of the exhibit is about how our bones have changed over the last few centuries, and then a hands-on laboratory, where I only stopped long enough to sex a couple of ilia and skulls. Then I went to the bathroom, which I love because the hallway by the bathrooms is crammed with displays!
And .. where was I? Oh right, eating lunch on the mall.
Birdies. They like to get close.
Looking across from my bench at the Smithsonian Castle: green grass and picnickers ignoring the fence, meant to let the grass grow back after we all killed it at the inauguration.
The path down the mall.
In front of the American History Museum.
I hadn't been to the American History Museum in ages. It has changed a LOT. It was at least twice as crowded as the NMNH, and very very bright and shiny, all through. I wandered around a bit, but didn't really go in to any of the exhibits. I've never seen the First Lady exhibit, and it looks like I won't any time soon: the line's a mile long. The main reason I ducked in was to see Stephen Colbert's portrait:
They have it BEHIND GLASS. That's AWESOME.
His portrait stands beside the first part of the line to see the pop culture exhibit. THE FIRST PART. I'm glad it's there, because I do adore Stephen, but not even for his portrait would I stand in that line. The American Flag, of course, also has a line a mile long.
I did duck into the illustration exhibit, because I remembered
enemy_anime mentioning it; it's very small, and totally not worth the trip just for that. The artifacts along the walls of the main halls are interesting, and had I been in the mood, the historic house or transportation exhibits probably could have absorbed me for hours, or the various science-museum-ish displays. I couldn't get in the mood, though; I only felt antsy to be back in the familiar confines of the NMNH. Eventually I figured out why: the NMAH feels like a giant propaganda warehouse.And that's sad.
Anyway! Back to my favorite museum ever!
They currently have an exhibit on soils, something I don't know nearly as much about as I ought to if I'm going to study archaeology. It turned out to be much more geared toward kids than toward me, but the wall lined with monoliths from every state were pretty interesting, and I took a picture of the column of soil types, because I can never remember which is which:
(you can see some monoliths behind it, kind of.)
I also wandered through the small Korea exhibit, and the Western Civilization hall. THAT is another hall that could use some reorganization, and hasn't been updated since I was born! (Well, they added a small display about Oetzi, but that's it.) I'm actually quite surprised the writing hasn't all rubbed off the walls. (There *are* two facial reconstructions that have lost all the paint off their noses!)
I would have liked to visit some other exhibits, especially the Africa one, but it was getting late and I was getting tired, and I couldn't leave without stopping by my most favorite exhibit ever in my most favorite museum ever: THE DINOSAUR HALL!!! (Picture me going *raaarrrrr* and making t-rex fingers at you right now.)
Mph. I kind of want to live there.
And here's the elephant, which, according to my museums professor, everyone who works there would love to get rid of, but that will never, ever, ever happen:
Oh, look at the walls and the arches and the lighting and and and .. I love this museum. ♥.
(Overheard while photographing the elephant: "I just want it to go extinct!" ... what.)
So, that was my lovely Saturday in DC. I missed that in North Dakota, and I'll know I'll miss it in Massachusetts, too: the ability to just go to the Mall when I feel like it. Maybe some of Boston's fantastic museums will help to soothe my pain.
That got long. I hope you enjoyed reading it, and I hope you go see Written in Bone if you get the chance. Despite the problems I mentioned, it is really a wonderful depiction of forensic historical archaeology.
And here's a picture of Darcy, totes chillin. Please lolcat at will.
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2. Iiiiiinteresting point on the "human" skull always being illustrated by a European one. I need to go back through my BioAnth stuff and see if that happened then--I'm suspecting that the only variation that was illustrated was between the Anatomically Modern Human (who was, I believe, European) and the Cro-Magnon, who ditto. Although my BioAnth class was pretty Eurocentric; I don't think we paid much attention to Africa once the AMHs left, and almost none to Asia (although that might be because they were probably using bamboo rather than stone technology).
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I started to say that it might not be quite as egregious in introductory bioanth, where most of the focus is on premodern anatomy - but, no, that's not true. Introductory classes like that are exactly where we should be discussing variation, where THE exemplary AMH should be other than European. Or better yet, maybe, a computer-generated composite average of humanity, if there's only one example shown.
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(Anonymous) 2009-04-21 01:04 pm (UTC)(link)Erica
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I wasn't particularly impressed with the Korea exhibit, either, but I don't think it does *too* bad considering it's only one tiny room. :/ I do find it a little troubling in general that the natural history museum is considered the logical spot for cultural exhibits.